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By Root 1017 0

As a result of this reluctance, and unlike the parliamentary taxes of the early seventeenth century, ship money also began to suffer from problems of collection. Clarendon went so far as to claim that the judgement had ‘proved of more advantage and credit to the gentleman condemned, Mr Hampden, than to the King’s service’. Hindsight no doubt exaggerated his view, but it is true that after the crown’s legal victory in 1637 the difficulties of collection in many counties continued to mount.98

English people were encouraged by practice and precept to be active for the public good. Self-government was crucial to the order of local communities and also to the public image of those individuals responsible for it – officeholders cultivated the image of virtue necessary to carry out their duties to the public good. In general this self-government was supportive of, and dependent on, the King’s command, but the two might not always sit well together. Responses to the King’s command were not simply passive and unthinkingly obedient, even when they were in fact obedient. Where there was reluctance, or resistance, it might not be the result of principled objection, but whether for reasons of narrow advantage – personal or local – or because of a wider vision of the public good, the King’s command was appraised and interpreted as well as acted upon. Government depended on the voluntary efforts of substantial local inhabitants, and during the 1630s the imposition of ship money and militia reform made their lives difficult. Those difficulties were not eased by the legal question marks which hung over the extent of their powers. Other grievances affected those in more elevated circles – for example, monopolies and distraint of knighthood – while the forest policy had a deep impact in some regions.

Behind all these policies lay legal questions which were potentially of very general significance and some people certainly invested them with that general significance. The absence of parliaments removed one important means of voicing grievances and the use of the Court of Star Chamber (the authority of which rested on the royal prerogative) to enforce them seemed to be increasingly politicized.99 This was not the stuff of revolution, or even of civil war, but it gave grounds to be reluctant to supply money, men and arms to fight the Covenanters; and to want the King to call a parliament instead.

In 1629 a sub-committee of the House of Commons had complained that persons maintaining ‘papistical, Arminian, and superstitious opinions and practices… are countenanced, favoured and preferred’. An associated protestation of the Commons was one of the measures passed while the Speaker was held down. It announced that anyone promoting Arminianism or popery should be ‘reputed a capital enemy to this Kingdom and Commonwealth’.100 The continued and apparently triumphant rise of Laudianism during the Personal Rule was not likely to have spread the blessings of ecclesiastical peace, therefore.101

Closer restrictions on preaching, which affected the freedom to preach predestinarian views, were clearly inflammatory but had less immediate impact on the experience of worshippers than the campaign to promote decency and order in public service and the beauty of holiness: moving the ‘communion table’ ‘altar-wise’, and placing it at the east end of the church, there to be railed off in a raised chancel; bowing to the altar; reintroducing decorative features such as paintings and statues; and reincorporating a number of ceremonies and rituals into worship. Thus, for example, worshippers were expected to register reverence and obeisance to God as a uniform body, so that ‘the whole congregation shall appear in the presence of God as one man, decently kneeling, rising, standing, bowing, praising, praying together… like men of one mind and religion in the house of God’. This was contrasted with a stolid immobility, likened to posts and stones; for its opponents it smelt of popish ritual, a form of mechanical worship which did not encourage a questing, demanding personal